NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Peter Carty examines two conflicting strategies in contemporary psychogeography and asks whether rules and regulations or radical subjectivity is the way forward.

The fashionable pursuit of remapping the cityscape is taking diverse forms – from rigid adherence to rules to wilful transgression. In Holland, Wilfried Hone Je Bek and his fellow psychogeographers (see [www.socialfiction.org]) are developing a ‘generative psychogeography’ with dÈrives derived from pre-determined algorithms. The hazards of social fiction’s adventures for other pavement users aside, fracturing the regime of the city through such strict rule-following may not be a realisation of psychogeography’s potentials. Arch prankster Stewart Home, who has long made psychogeography a basis of his art practice describes a much more flexible approach in his latest pamphlet (How I Discovered America, Infopool No.6, 2002 [www.infopool.org.uk]). Home’s premise is that America (or Amerikkka, as he calls it) exists everywhere as a state of mind. So he’s journeyed around selected spots in Britain to find it for himself, taking photographs to document his exploits.

Some of Home’s pictures show housing built for American servicemen working at an intelligence installation; but most have no connection, however tenuous, with the ‘actual’ USA. The implication is that psychogeography need not insist on a connection between interior and exterior environments, a return to the practice’s first principles that recovers its imaginative and critical potential. Home’s approach, which resembles the old tactic of navigating one territory with the map of another, deploys an apparently radical subjectivism to focuses the reader’s attention on the (philosophical) idealism of America itself, a simulacral Kingdom of Heaven-on-earth.

Some would consider this approach politically suspect, of course. Psychogeography has often been attacked as anti-materialist, bourgeois and idealist. Home seems at once to flaunt the idiosyncracy of his ‘viewpoint’ and deconstruct the notion of there being a ‘psychological’ subject to whom this view could be ascribed. Those wondering if psychogeography’s increasingly gentrified conceptual by-ways are still worth visiting will find, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that there’s no place like Home.
By Peter Carty and from Mute Magazine 2003.

A Cavalier History Of Surrealism by Raoul Vaneigem as 'J-F Dupuis' (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith)
After Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem is one of the more celebrated situationist theorists. This short sketch of a forerunner to the group of which he was once a leading light, says more about Vaneigem’s theoretical weaknesses than it does about his ostensible subject. Vaneigem usefully stresses the specificity of surrealism, concentrating on its differences to dada. Unfortunately, he rather mechanically expands on the situationist dictum that the dadaists wanted to suppress art without realising it, while the surrealists wanted to realise art without suppressing it. Part and parcel of Vaneigem’s reductive treatment of this subject are his blinkered Eurocentric and Francophone perspectives. His more general pronouncements emerge very clearly from his immersion in European high culture and indicate an inadequate knowledge of other social and cultural forms. Vaneigem’s grasp of history is every bit as defective as his attempts at dialectic. He writes of books being transformed into commodities by the market when, as perhaps the first perfected capitalist commodity, the book actually played a key role in the development of capitalist markets (there is a dialectical relationship between books and the market, Vaneigem’s treatment is one-sided). However, while this is a bad book, it is also a very instructive one. The attraction of situationism for many of its fans is the air of extremism that emerges from the very weaknesses that are displayed so extravagantly here. The text is well worth reading, not as a critical primer on surrealism, but rather as an unconscious exposition of the flaws underlying situationist ideology.
Stewart Home, review originally published in Mute Magazine.

Some Recent London Art Shows, January 2007 Blog
Tripped off to the Tate Modern the other week but failed to join the religion that worships money. However it wasn't all a waste of time, the best thing being "David Smith Sculptures". Smith was an important mid-twentieth century American sculptor who assimilated the influence of the European avant-garde into his work before many of his transatlantic peers. So far so good, and you see Smith working methodically thru ideas in his steel sculptures. Although Smith ain't my bag, I didn't feel I was wasting my time looking at his work. Smith is serious but with a sense of humour. The best thing in the exhibition was actually the documentary film projected in the last room. This was an edition of "Art New York" about Smith entitled "The Sculpting Master of Bolton Landing". Dating from the early sixties, this educational TV programme has the ultra-camp poet and MOMA curator Frank O'Hara interviewing a cigar chomping Smith. There are some fine location shots around Smith's Bolton Landing sculpture workshop and when O'Hara refers to the sculptures as male, Smith insists they are all female. Later when O'Hara thanks Smith for coming to New York for a television studio interview, the sculptor makes it clear he's been having a good time in the Big Apple not simply appearing on camera but going out to see dancing girls. Which reminds me, I first read O'Hara's "Lunch Poems" back in the late seventies when I was sweet sixteen, but after seeing him interviewing Smith, opening that publication is never going to be quite the same experience again. It has taken me nearly thirty years to realise just how super phat and groovy O'Hara actually was.

Across the hall from David Smith was "Flowers & Questions: A Retrospective" by Fischli & Weiss, two Swiss artists with all the talent of a retarded ameba. According to The Tate their work is an: "exploration of the similarities between high and low culture, the spectacular and the mundane, is characterised by a playful sense of humour. In focusing on the understated, the mediocre, the unmemorable and the pointless, they show us a world of inconspicuous wonders." Actually they show us a vision of utter tedium, that art is dead baby, and we need to burn the museums.... Fischli & Weiss are the sort of people who give post-modernism a bad name. So you have a load of banal photographs of supposedly dramatic scenes composed from sausages, cold meats and common household objects. Watching paint dry is more interesting. Also at the Tate Modern were various helter skelters installed by a well known German "artist"; as shoots they were fun, or at least I enjoyed the higher ones, and since I blagged free tickets to everything it was cheaper than going to the fun fair. And as for these shoots being "art", as Up Against The Wall King Mob put it way back when in the sixties: "the death of art spells the murder of artists, the real anti-artists appear..." Downstairs was "Media Burn", an exhibition "critiquing media, politics and art itself". This was built around the mid-seventies Ant Farm film "Media Burn" in which a car is driven into a bank of burning television sets. Nice image and some of the media coverage included in the video is funny but the film goes on way too long. The rest of this show isn't worth looking at.

Elsewhere "Indica" at Riflemaker Gallery was undoubtedly more interesting as a social event at the overcrowded opening than as a show. Indica is a legendary London Gallery of the sixties that intersected with the counterculture and showed the likes of Yoko Ono, Liliane Lijn, Takis and the Boyle Family. Works by these old stalwarts were mixed with younger artists exploring similar psychedelic territory. There were some good pieces but it didn't work for me as a whole, and I'd have rather seen the recreation of a single Indica show than this attempt to simulate the vibe of the place, something that could only work at the opening. Meanwhile at Gasworks in south London "Lapdogs Of The Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Arts" was a group show with a wonderfully unfashionable title. A subtitle like that is bound to let you down, and the exhibition had a lot more to do with art than class, but at least it provided a nod and a wink in the right direction.
From Stewart Home blog.

Collector's File - Gilbert & George
Despite being among the best known of British artists, Gilbert & George are easily upset by bad press. Several years ago the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, who handle Gilbert & George, issued a circular to museum curators which instructed them on how to be suitably reverential towards the odd couple. The demands made by Anthony d'Offay on behalf of their clients were extraordinary, and included the following specification: "if a catalogue is to be produced for the exhibition, they only wish to participate if their work is to be discussed in the introduction (if there is an introduction); but not in a way which denigrates either them or their work, in which case they would prefer not to be included in the exhibition."

Gilbert & George also demanded that their "pictures should never be described as photographs." This request was absurd because their work is basically photography, albeit executed on a monumental scale. Likewise, Gilbert & George insist that their art is not modernist, stating that "we say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the Life of People." However, the odd couple are very coy about admitting that their photographs actually operate within the discourse of totalitarian art. This is a tradition that the art historian Igor Golomstock has described as being, after modernism, the second international style of twentieth-century culture.

The singularly most important component in Gilbert & George's work is the constant reproduction of their own image. The cult of the personality is, of course, the central element of all totalitarian art. It logically follows from this that the odd couple's photographs are not really aimed at private collectors, they are intended for public consumption. The Anthony d'Offay Gallery were extremely obstructive when I asked them to put me in touch with private buyers of Gilbert & George's work. After giving me the run around for three days, the girlies who work at the gallery provided me with a list of museums who'd bought work by the odd couple. No doubt Sadie Coles and Kirsty Bell, who radiate deb. stupidity, feel very sophisticated when informing their friends that Gilbert & George's latest works are entitled Naked Shit Pictures. These two girlies certainly seemed ignorant enough to think I'd be unable to track down a buyer of the odd couple's work without the gallery's assistance.

In fact it's easy to identify the type of private collector who buys work by Gilbert & George, because their gallery attracts faded glitterati such as the pop singer Brian Ferry and the film director Karel Reisz. While it's unlikely these individuals share Anthony d'Offay's unsavoury interest in Wyndham Lewis, totalitarian chic has long proved irresistible to the fashion crowd. Scott Crolla bought one of Gilbert & George's monumental photographs by instalments to hang in his Dover Street clothes shop. In the eighties, Crolla was a Mecca of Hip, generating reams of coverage in fashion-bibles such as The Face, although the shop closed at the height of the recession, unable to capitalise on this type of publicity when money was tight.

The use of monumental photography bought on tick as an advertisement of a fashionable life-style, is hardly the most interesting reason to collect totalitarian art. However, the fashion connection did provide an outlet whereby individuals who are unable to obtain favourable credit terms from Anthony d'Offay could buy into the odd couple's totalitarian dream. In 1993, the Daniel James clothes shop in Sloane Street was selling T-shirts featuring limited edition silk-screen prints of Gilbert & George photographs, priced at between £30 and £150.

John Berndt, a gay skinhead who lives on a South London council estate is the proud owner of one of these, alongside various other bits and pieces of Gilbert & George memorabilia. Berndt doesn't like modern art, he thinks pictures should show you something you can recognise, although he never uses the terms abstract and representational. Asked why he bought his Gilbert & George T-shirt, John responds that "it's different." I'm sure the odd couple would be pleased with this reply, after all they claim to make art for the people. However, collectors looking for a sound investment would be well advised to steer clear of Gilbert & George, historically the monetary value of totalitarian art has tended to erode over the years.
First published in the Modern Review February/March 1995.